


how long to stay and when to go

by Sister



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: M/M, the usual sex and violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:27:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23503855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sister/pseuds/Sister
Summary: The facts are these: he hasn't spent more than two nights in a row away from Tim Drake's bed in the past eight months.Eight.Months.++Jason flips out a little. As you do.
Relationships: Tim Drake/Jason Todd
Comments: 79
Kudos: 941





	how long to stay and when to go

**Author's Note:**

> have a quarantine snack from me, kids. 
> 
> title from the dixie chicks. 
> 
> as usual, modern dc comics is dead to me and everything below is from my pre-2011 happy place.

how long to stay and when to go

  
The absolute worst part of it all is that Jason is perfectly aware of what's happening. Of what's going on. Of the _facts_. It would be so much easier if he could stomp on the relevant synapses, or suffer a mild and extremely targeted stroke to the parts of his brain that are awake and alive to his current reality, blaring the facts at him at all hours of the day and night, and the _facts_ , fuck them all, are these: he hasn't spent more than two nights in a row away from Tim Drake's bed in the past eight months.

Eight.

Months.

Jason is extremely aware of this number, and incredibly extremely aware that in another week it will be _nine_ months, but nine months is a problem for next week, because this week the problem is still eight months. Eight months. Eight. This number haunts him. He cannot forget this number. His brain does not give him a moment's rest from this number. _EIGHT MONTHS!_ bellow the synapses, when he's brushing his teeth while Tim's still sacked out cold under the covers. _EIGHT MONTHS!_ bellow the synapses, when he's poking around the used bookstore on Washington, trying to lull himself to insensibility with the smell of paperbacks. _EIGHT MONTHS!_ bellow the synapses, when he's rewrapping his bruised knuckles in the shadow of a grimy overpass and deciding whether to point his bike towards the safehouse they've been camped in for the past handful of weeks _or_ whether it might not be a better idea to point his bike right over the goddamn bridge and keep running till he hits Florida. _EIGHT MONTHS!_ bellow the synapses, but then as per usual the rest of Jason's braincells all take up bats and quickly and violently beat those synapses to death without mercy, but certainly not before Jason hears them and understands that he's lost control in a way that should scare him _straight_ to Florida, or perhaps further south to a new life in a remote fishing hut in Cuba.

And it does scare him. It does, viscerally so. Jason Todd is absolutely terrified, just shaking in his boots at what's happening, but he's not scared enough to stay away, and so he finishes rewrapping his damn knuckles which really do ache something fierce and rides back to the safehouse, which is a third-floor walkup in a painfully beautiful brownstone that came _fully furnished,_ which naturally makes everything much worse, and lets himself in to find Tim on the couch digging long wooden splinters out of his calf with tweezers and a penlight, so of course Jason has to go take the tweezers away from him and go to work himself, and his knuckles still hurt but his hands are steady and sure and gentle as anything, and afterwards Tim traces his thumb over Jason's cheekbone and leans over to kiss him, and then Jason has more to occupy his thoughts than any number of months, weeks, or days, synapses be damned.

But sometimes Jason wakes up in the middle of the night, everything sleepy and warm and lit up with the streetlamps coming in through the window, and through the barest crack of his eyelids he can see Tim sitting up in bed and watching him, just staring at him, and by the look on Tim's face Jason can tell that Tim has his own set of responsible synapses eager to give him the facts, and because it's _Tim_ he probably has a hell of a lot more of those synapses than Jason does, and probably they're all sitting at a conference table in Tim's head and distributing spiral-bound files in triplicate.

But Tim never says anything. And Jason never says anything. Anything about _anything_ , in fact: not the eight months, not the shared safehouses, not the disgusting cans of Zesti Cola Jason's now automatically adding to his cart whenever he's at the grocery store, and certainly not the sex—that is, not the fact that they're really very obviously only having it with each other, and have been ever since that first time, when one thing led to another and a fight turned into wrestling turned into Tim squirming underneath Jason on the roof of the old library building, kissing Jason like he was desperate for it and heaving a moan when Jason pinned his wrists above his head.

They don't talk about it. They haven't talked about it for eight months. At one point near Month Four Jason tailed a suspect all the way to Chicago, and two nights later Tim showed up at his hotel, claiming he had urgent Wayne Enterprises business in the area, and Jason was so glad to see him he was hard-pressed to put on enough of a front to _hide_ how glad he was to see him, leaning against the doorway with his grin tamped down and his eyebrows raised while Tim finished giving his bullshit explanation, which ended with Tim saying, "and anyway I should probably get back to the Wayne suites downtown," which was more than Jason's carefully-constructed front of indifference could take, so he yanked Tim inside the room with a grip on his pretty silk tie and fucked him twice on the hotel bed before abandoning pretenses entirely and making out with him against the pillows for forty solid minutes.

They don't talk about it.

And then another week ticks over and it's been _nine fucking months, jesus shit goddamn,_ and alarm bells are going off in Jason's head like the world is on fire. He really does point his bike over the bridge this time, but he's headed east, over past Woodville and on up, deep into Ocean City and the Jersey Shore, miserable and wind-chapped in winter, great gray waves smashing in on the empty beach. He kicks his way up and down the dunes for hours, shivering in the wind, and finally ends up plunked down in the sand, heels dug in and chucking pebbles into the surf. It's too wet on the coast for the snow to really come down, but the occasional few flakes manage the trip, white and sparkling in the hazy light of the moon.

_NINE MONTHS!_ scream his synapses, only it's not just the usual miserable handful ready to be smothered by the rest of him; this time it's his whole brain, everything firing on all cylinders to deliver the news that he's fucked, he's screwed, he's really goddamn done it this time, and then one extremely sly and malicious braincell whispers the word _boyfriend_ and Jason lurches to his feet and actually has to dry-heave over some crabs while the rest of his braincells grab their bats and beat the evil one to death without mercy.

Midnight comes and goes, and then one, and two. He's really very cold by three, which is wonderful because that's certainly the reason why his hands are shaking, and why it feels like he can't pull enough air into his lungs. He cannot imagine going home. _Home_ , whispers the evil braincell, speaking from beyond the grave, and Jason can't breathe, he can't breathe, he can't fucking _breathe_ and he has to skid his way down to where the tide's coming in and scoop up a handful of ocean water to slosh on his face. It's so cold he shouts with it, all his fingers on fire and his nose numb, and then he marches back up to his bike and rides back to Gotham and the beautiful goddamn brownstone with no idea what he'll do or say when he gets there, except that when he's left his bike on the street and dragged his way up the three flights of stairs and disabled the security and gotten the door open, Tim's not there.

More than not there. Tim's gone.

His computers are gone. His weapons are gone. His clothes which he leaves flung all over everything are gone. His crumpled pile of ripped Red Robin suits is gone. Even his ridiculous skateboard is gone, vanished from its hooks on the wall where it's hung like some absurd piece of frat-house art for all the weeks they've been in the place. Jason walks around the apartment with his mouth hanging open, just a little, and then he opens the fridge and sees that even the seven or eight bottles of Starbucks cold brew are gone, but for some reason, for some ungodly shitting reason, Tim's left behind the entire new sixpack of Zesti Cola, just sitting there untouched on the bottom shelf, and Jason's so abruptly furious that he rips a can out of the plastic rings and hurls it away and whips his silenced Glock out of his belt and fucking blasts the thing out of the air, two shots that slide through the aluminum and embed themselves in the godforsaken wainscoting, and then of course he has to spend twenty minutes on his hands and knees scrubbing sticky brown soda off the walls and hardwoods and feeling like an idiot, which he is, but not because of the Zesti, or rather yes, entirely because of the Zesti; that is, that there's Zesti in the fridge at all.

Jason survives twelve more minutes in the apartment before throwing a bunch of clothes into a duffle bag and clearing the hell out, back down the stairs and back on his bike and off uptown to the only safehouse he has on deck that he and Tim haven't rotated through this year, and that's only because Tim's too fucking posh to slum it with the roaches and the asbestos and the thumping Puerto Rican rap coming in through the paper-thin walls, and as Jason's disarming the security and kicking open the door he supposes he should be grateful for it, that there's one place in his life Tim hasn't contaminated with his presence, but instead he just feels sad and shitty and when he gets the lights on and stomps all the roaches he discovers he's actually pathetically grateful for the rap music because it makes the place not feel so damn empty. He falls asleep with his phone in his hand, but he's pretty sure that's just because he doesn't want to miss a blizzard warning.

Tim's gone because Tim wants to be gone, so Jason doesn't go looking, and besides ( _NINE MONTHS!_ ) Jason wants to be gone too. The first day is easy. Jason works out and reads a book and gets street food from Chinatown and rides around the neighborhood at night collecting intel from his informants and beating a pimp's face in with a jagged two-by-four he grabs out of a dumpster. He rolls back to the nasty safehouse in the small hours to shower and practice his Spanish on the Puerto Rican rap, which is really very catchy. He's left his phone shut completely off on the bed the whole day and he stares at it while he's brushing his teeth, thinking about all the blizzard warnings he might have missed, and he has the thing in his hand and his thumb halfway to the power button before he decides that probably he'll notice a blizzard when all the snow starts coming down, so he carries the phone to the kitchen and shuts it away in the pantry behind the dusty ancient tower of ramen packets.

The second day is easy. The heat shuts off in the apartment, which brings him awake at dawn with his breath hanging in the air and his fingers numb. But Jason grew up in shitty Gotham apartments where the supers played fast and loose with the heating laws, especially when the buildings were full of tenants who were themselves playing fast and loose with the concept of paying a timely amount of rent, so he gets to spend a profitable morning breaking into the building basement to turn the knobs himself and then teaching six or eight of the big-eyed hungry neighbor kids how to do their own breaking and entering so they can handle it themselves once Jason inevitably clears out. And after that one of the kids who's maybe nine years old is dumb enough to try to sell him something in a plastic baggie he's calling frill that actually seems to be pharmacy-quality oxy, so then that's Jason's whole afternoon taken care of, confiscating the drugs and having a very long and drawn-out chat with several of the neighborhood dealers about the appropriate age-range of the players in their distribution network, which royally pisses off the kingpin, a gentleman called Stinky who leads a convoy of angry foot soldiers straight to where Jason's patiently waiting for them inside a boarded-up deli, and so Jason's very busy the whole night long, done and dusted, easy.

The third day is hell.

Jason wakes up with none of his synapses screaming at him. None at all. Everything is quiet: the synapses, the rap music, the scuttling roaches, even the traffic on the street, although when he looks out the window he discovers the street is quiet because the street is invisible under the ungodly amount of snow that's dumping out of the sky, a good ol' January blizzard to shove Gotham into the only sort of ceasefire it gets all year. It's a mercy, because in the commotion last night there was a moment when Jason didn't move quite fast enough and a bullet skated straight over the meat of his left bicep, taking a whole gouge of flesh with it, and now he's in really rather a lot of pain, although not as much pain as the owner of the offending gun must currently be in, laid up no doubt in Mercy General with both wrists broken and also several ribs. So Jason spends the morning changing the bandage on his arm and popping the pain pills he took out of the pocket of one of the dealers—still in the original orange Walgreens bottle—and watching the snow and feeling really somehow quite peaceful, and he's just thinking about getting up to make one of the ramen packets when that one special and particularly-evil braincell taps him on the shoulder and announces that it has no longer been nine months since he's spent more than two nights away from Tim's bed, because it has now been _three_ nights in total and Tim is absolutely nowhere to be found.

Many of the synapses start screaming after that. The phone comes out of the pantry and Jason jabs the power button with shaking fingers, but when the screen lights up there's only one text message and it's from a food delivery app letting him know that the Dominican place on 70th has free plantains this week with a ten-dollar purchase, and Jason does love a good plantain but right now his stomach is feeling queasy and ill and like there's a knot sitting right in the middle of it and for a moment Jason wonders if he's about to throw up, which is almost certainly the result of taking pain pills on an empty stomach, but he breathes and squints his eyes closed and breathes and manages not to hurl. He powers the phone off again and shuts it back up in the pantry, but then after he's forced down a bowl of ramen for the queasiness he somehow finds the phone in his hand again, heavy and cold and dark, and it's definitely the evil braincell that makes him turn the thing back on and shove it into his pocket. He goes to lean his forehead against the window and stare out at the snow, which is coming down so hard that all he can see beyond the glass is an endless muffling blanket of white.

He doesn't go anywhere that day, but then neither does anyone else. He prowls around the apartment, wiping down countertops and sweeping up dead roaches and watching out the window while the neighborhood kids slide around the empty streets on baking sheets and trash-can lids, the way Jason used to do when he was very very small and things hadn't gone entirely to shit yet. Tim's probably never rocketed down a snowbank on a baking sheet in his whole life. Probably what Tim had when he was very very small was a ninety-dollar brand-name aerodynamically-optimized sled his daddy got him from a business trip to Norway, and probably Tim just sat in the middle of it all bundled up head to toe in toasty-warm ski gear while his nanny dragged the thing up and down baby bunny hills, and probably those hills weren't even in Gotham because Jason can't imagine little tiny Timmy being let out to play in the streets like a commoner. If Tim were here Jason would ask him about it and then mock him about it and then march him out into the street to borrow a baking sheet off one of the neighbor kids and make up for lost time about it. Jason grins to himself, and then he remembers, and then he curses quietly and goes to lie down on the mattress. His arm hurts.

He sleeps on and off for most of the day. Mostly it really is the fault of the pain pills, but there are several moments when he struggles back awake long enough to get up to pee and drink some water and look around the barren kitchen long enough to decide he doesn't really want to be conscious right at present, and the easiest way out of that is just to go back to sleep again. He dreams (not about Tim, he's never dreamed about Tim) deep strange things, twisting nightmares, the usual death and pain and blood and monsters and laughter, but that's nothing new. What _is_ new is that whenever he comes awake with a gasp, sheets soaked with sweat, Tim's not there to glance down at him from where he's propped up against the pillows, typing away on a laptop or three, and tell him, "You're okay," not a question, not a command—a statement of fact, cool and clinical, and then Tim would hold his gaze until Jason was all the way back into his body before he'd reach out a hand and touch him. Tim had nightmares too, but he slept such strange hours that Jason only rarely caught him afterwards, eyes open and staring at nothing, too far away to hear his own name when Jason called.

He suits up and goes out that night into the snowy neighborhood, bad arm caught up in a sling under his jacket. It's punishingly cold, but the streets are clear—the snowplows have been through at least three times, throwing heaps of the stuff over the sidewalks and putting down fresh salt that crunches under Jason's boots as he walks, and there's nothing for him to do except pull two or three homeless guys out of their cardboard burrows and force them along to one of the city shelters, and after that there's no one on the streets but him. He goes back to the apartment for his bike, intending to ride loops around the Yards or maybe Park Row, just for something to do, but when he gets to the building he goes inside instead and takes another pain pill and goes back to sleep. 

The fourth day is just as bad.

Jason comes out of a nightmare and into the cold morning light in an explosive amount of pain, which turns out to be because in the night he rolled onto his side and crushed his bad arm into the mattress for several hours. He changes the dressing and flushes the rest of the pain pills down the toilet so he won't be tempted, even though his arm hurts like hell. One day is enough on that crap. But the sudden mental clarity is in no way preferable to the endless wacko nightmares because it reminds Jason that not only is he miserable and utterly furious about just how miserable he is, he's also horny enough to keel over and die, because it's been months and months and months and _months_ since he went any length of time whatsoever without having sex, not since all the way back in Month Two when both he and Tim managed to come down with the flu at the same time (in retrospect, this was probably inevitable) and were both too ill and disgusting to get off for about three solid days, but that was _three_ days, not four, and also in retrospect there might have been a hazy moment when Jason woke up from a feverish wet dream to find he'd come in his shorts, but surely it only counted if Jason were actually conscious for the orgasm.

Anyway Jason's hard up enough that he doesn't even get his sweatpants all the way off for the first round, just shoves them around his knees and flops back on the mattress with his hand already working his cock, tight and quick and urgent, his own familiar calluses scraping just good enough, and four minutes later he grunts and comes and wipes his hand and drags his sweats back up and goes about his day for exactly two and a half hours before he's back on the mattress again, sweatpants kicked all the way off this time, swearing and fucking up into his fist, chasing an orgasm that somehow just will not be caught. His body doesn't want his hand and his calluses. His body isn't used to making do with his hand and his calluses. What he's gotten used to is—God, so much. Taking his time. Kissing Tim dizzy and peeling him out of his suit, biting Tim's jaw when Tim squeezes him through his jock. Running his hands over Tim's skin, touching and touching, letting Tim squirm naked on his lap. The heat of him inside, the velvet pressure on Jason's slick fingers, and Jesus, that first sweet push, so tight Jason could sob. Tim on his knees, Tim on his belly, Tim on his back, Tim hoisted up in Jason's arms against the wall, or Jason on his back and Tim sliding himself down on Jason's cock, and then sometimes, sometimes, leaning forward and wrapping his fingers around Jason's throat, his thumb flat in the soft place between Jason’s collarbones, not pressing in, just holding it there, holding Jason's eyes, and then leaning down to lick Jason's bottom lip while Jason goes shivery and hot all over and jerks his hips up hard. Tim grinning down at him, his canines so sharp and so white. On the mattress in the shitty safehouse, Jason spills over his fingers with his eyes screwed shut, but when he comes back to himself, breathing hard, nothing has changed.

Day Five.

Day Six.

Day Seven.

Day Eight and Jason has come out of being miserable and horny and circled back around to viciously pissed off and horny. He roars around the neighborhood on his bike, getting into ridiculous petty streetfights with gangsters who haven't done anything much but swagger down the sidewalk with their pieces on display, and when he slams back into the safehouse in the early hours he has to work himself over the edge twice before he can even think about getting any sleep. He grabs for his phone after the second time and takes a photo of his belly streaked with come, and he has it loaded up into a text message to fire off to Tim before his brain starts working again and he deletes the whole thing.

On Day Nine Jason slows to a stop outside the gay club on Madison—pink and blue lights, faintly thumping music, rainbow flags waving outside the door. A bouncer stomping his feet to keep warm on the snowy sidewalk. He ought to do it. Go in. Find someone, just for the night. Get it out of his system. Or, hell, there are girls in every other club in all of Gotham who'd be happy to come home with his abdominal muscles for something meaningless and fun. "Come in or get lost," the bouncer tells him, and Jason puts his head down and keeps walking. He’s ditched the sling, but his arm is still throbbing like it has something to say: _jackass, jackass, jackass._

On Day Ten Jason hauls himself to the top of an apartment tower on the eastside for its perfect line of sight into the penthouse next door, where about twelve guys are wrapping up bricks and handing them off to kids with backpacks. He's thinking about making drug rings his winter project, something to fool with until the snow starts to melt. This high up, the wind whips through him like a bullet through a can of Zesti Cola, and when he paces the edge to knock some life back into his feet, he can see all the way down Third Street, miles and miles to downtown, and right there at the very edge of his vision, a tiny speck of a crumb, is the Gotham Opera House, all decked out in searchlights and spotlights and floodlights and shining like an anthill on fire. Jason jogs in place with his fingers stuffed in his armpits. Something is pinging his memory. Opera House, January, lights and bustle, probably music, probably door guards, probably limousines filled with frightful old Gotham matrons swimming in pearls and pashminas… The Wayne Charity Gala. Of course. Jason paces back to his perch beside the forgotten mummified crumbles of someone’s summer tomato garden and starts pulling the magazine and field rest for his M110 sniper rifle out of the Mickey Mouse duffel he found at Goodwill, hands working without his brain attached, since his brain is now wholly and irreversibly occupied with the Moulin Rouge.

And Vintage Hollywood. And Vegas, Baby. And Anchors Away. And the eight or twelve different gala themes that Tim considered and rejected back in October while sprawled across the couch in sweatpants and one of Jason’s undershirts, tablet in hand and scrolling through Pinterest lists for inspiration. Arabian Nights was racist. Secret Garden sounded sexual (he was not interested in Jason demonstrating the point). Roaring Twenties had been used last year. In the end Winter Wonderland won out, no matter how much Tim groused that by the end of January everyone would be sick of winter and would much rather come to a party called Bali Bikini Beach Bonanza, and then Jason said fuck it all maybe _he_ would actually come to a party called Bali Bikini Beach Bonanza, and Tim said would he really, and Jason said yeah probably so but only to watch Tim give his speech in a speedo, and Tim said sure but would he actually come, and Jason said only for the speedo, and Tim said sadly he couldn’t _actually_ use that theme, and Jason said that’s good because he wouldn’t _actually_ come, and Tim sighed and flicked Jason between the eyes and for some reason they didn’t have sex that night.

Jason waits until all the kids with backpacks have left the penthouse, and then waits some more while each and every backpack-laden child makes it all the way down the elevator and out through the front door. He counts them twice, just to make sure. Then he eyeballs the men still in the room talking and laughing and lighting up and doing lines and shoots two of them in the head so fast the sound of the second shot swallows the first in one tight gulp. Just two random guys. Probably no one special. Or maybe they were special, Jason doesn’t know. He’s already unclipping the magazine and dropping it back down into Mickey’s unzipped guts. He watches the chaos in the room across the street with a passive eye. People screaming, people crying. People shouting into their phones. In a minute a lot more people will show up and then those people will shout and maybe cry and then all the people together will race down the elevator and stream out into the street and go hunt up anyone they can find from Stinky’s gang of frill-sellers and kill them and then Stinky will shout and probably not cry and will turn his people loose after the eastside frill-sellers and there will be more gunshots and more people dead and by morning, Jason knows, by morning whatever’s left of both gangs will be meaner, dirtier, weaker, and probably ready to be swept up with a broom and dustpan and dumped down the garbage disposal. Jason isn’t thinking too hard about it. He’s mostly thinking now about how to prevent himself from doing something blindingly stupid, but since he’s been pretty much batting negative digits on that one since birth, it’s really only a matter of time before he’s left his bike in a downtown parking garage and is trudging up the alley behind the Opera House on foot.

On foot, in a stale-smelling tuxedo he had to make a pitstop at yet another safehouse to pull out of its garment bag, too tight by half around the dressing on his arm and no doubt impossibly out of style. There aren’t even any guards by the stage door out back, just a keycard access panel he shorts out with his pocket taser. The door clicks open and he steps into a bright hallway, dressing rooms starting up on his left and the hysterical shouting and breaking glass of a large-scale catering operation underway to his right, better than any signpost: this way, please. He slides through the chaos without making eye contact with anyone besides—suddenly and arrestingly—himself, lit up in one of the gilt-framed mirrors hung on the wall just outside the prep kitchen doors, his bowtie askew and hair going every which-way, wild about the eyes, dark circles dug in like somebody socked him real good when he wasn’t looking. He looks like a crazy person. He _is_ a crazy person, he decides, as he steps around the corner and into the party, light and noise and laughter and echoing from every corner the unmistakable accents of Mid-Atlantic moneybags who’ve spent more time on the Vineyard than inside Gotham’s city limits. Jason pauses, but only to assess the situation, and definitely not because he’s in any way intimidated, but there’s simply no getting around the fact that he’s never been able to do this sort of thing, the parties and the fat cats and the heavens-the- _state_ -of-the-market-this-quarter, not ever, not even at fourteen years old, stuffed into an itchy kiddy-tux and warned to make nice, Bruce’s fingers clamped down on his shoulder steering him towards one deep-pocketed write-off-chaser after another. For one thing, his Park Row accent gives him away every time he opens his mouth.

But he’s not here to chat up the party guests tonight, Jason reminds himself. He’s only here to—

To what, exactly? What? Jason retreats around the corner again and ignores the curious looks of the servers refilling their champagne trays. He glares at himself in the giant-ass wall mirror with its pretentious ornamental patination and is forced to admit that he has absolutely no plan to speak of. Up until this moment he’s been operating entirely on impulse, but now that impulse has gone up in smoke, he’s at a loss for how to come out of this mess feeling like a winner and not like a brick-headed idiot who’s too bummed out and sick in the heart (he stomps on the evil braincell) sick in the _head_ to make it two weeks without Tim, who will not be giving a speech in a speedo tonight but is here nevertheless, _here_ , in this building, most likely right at the center of a knot of pharmaceutical execs and transpo bigshots, pulling in million-dollar charity donations hand over fist while smooth-talking about yacht clubs and tax shelters in Monaco. Jason takes a very deep breath.

He ought to wait. Lurk out back and catch Tim while he’s leaving. He _ought_ to go home and eat ramen alone. He _ought_ to blow his brains out with that M110 rifle. It would be the gentlemanly thing to do. Tim is gone because he wants to be gone, Jason reminds himself, but then several braincells at once underline the reality that Tim is in fact not gone at all, actually indeed _actually_ he is right here at the Opera House with the pharmaceutical execs, really in truth inside this very building, and it’s been ten days ten days _ten fucking days_ and Jason’ll be damned if he lets it get to eleven.

With still no plan but considerably more groundless confidence, Jason pushes his way through the life of the party. Winter Wonderland is in full swing, fake trees with bare silver branches crowded in every corner, chandeliers turned down low, white hydrangeas mounded up like snowdrifts across the tablecloths, taper candles making the ice sculptures shine. He slides past congressmen and their daughters, past old-blood Gothamites and new-blood Gothamites, New Yorkers and Philadelphians and Atlantic City casino tycoons and what few Metropolitans have deigned to make the trip up from Delaware, and then he slams to a stop and whips behind an ice sculpture of a giant snowflake as he catches sight of Dick Grayson coming down the grand staircase in the clutches of his admirers. Right, of course, there are going to be more Waynes at the Wayne Charity Gala than the one he’s looking for. Probably they’re all here, the whole poisonous nest of them, and probably buddied up with the wider net of rich folks who’d also know him on sight, Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance, Selina Kyle, Diana Prince. But there’s no hope for it. Jason steels himself and sallies forth into the fray, right up the stairs past the golden boy himself, who glances at his face and then stares and then whips out an arm like a striking viper to get a hold on Jason’s sleeve.

“What in the _world_ —” Dick says, and he’s forgotten to use his Dickie-Grayson-tabloid-princess voice, so all the pretty party people fawning on him nearly pee themselves at suddenly being introduced to Nightwing, lord commander of heaven and earth and all the insignificant denizens thereof. “Explain yourself. Now.”

Jason bares his teeth and shakes off Dick’s grip. “Don’t lose your shirt, big bird. Not here to bring trouble.”

Dick snorts. “Right. I give it thirty minutes before trouble manages to bring itself.”

“Some of us are just here to enjoy the party,” Jason says. “Have a little faith.” He turns away and concentrates on projecting an air of supreme nonchalance as he continues up the stairs, but his heart is pounding like mad. He feels like a cornered gopher, marked for death by the circling hawks.

Tim’s not on the mezzanine, or down any of the hallways, or near the concession tables holding delicate towers of Wayne-embossed petit fours. He’s not in the bathrooms or the dressing rooms or the storage rooms or the rehearsal rooms. He’s not in the upper levels, or on the stage when Jason peers down from the highest balcony to check. Probably he’s back on the ground floor. Probably he’s standing around with Bruce and Damian and Kate Kane and Babs and Cassie and Steph Brown and, fuck it all, Clark Goddamn Kent. Probably Jason's an idiot. He sits down on one of the velvet couches in the top floor’s deserted hallway to form a new plan of attack, one that doesn’t involve having to explain himself to six or eight more Dick Graysons, and ten minutes later he’s still sitting there, working a thread loose from the seam of his cuff and feeling really tremendously dumb. His arm hurts.

Jason’s so low on himself that when someone sits down on the opposite end of the couch, it takes him one beat, two beats, three to realize that there’s only one person who could have come this close without Jason’s internal alarms going wild. “Hey,” Tim says, and Jason keeps his head down, he won’t let himself look, he won’t _let_ himself, so all he sees are Tim’s shoes, beautifully shined, catching and reflecting the glow of the wall sconces. “Dick told me.”

“Yeah,” Jason says.

“No speedos tonight, I’m afraid,” Tim says.

“Shame,” Jason says, or tries to say, but in fact nothing comes out, because his tongue has become too heavy for his mouth. 

“Jason,” Tim says, and then, much softer, when the silence stretches out and out, “Jay.”

Jason raises his head, but only as far as Tim’s hands, the right one on his thigh, the left gripping the edge of the couch hard enough that the velvet dimples around his fingers, around the thin white scar that curls up from the heel of his palm, achingly familiar.

“Are you okay?” Jason asks, finally, after an eternity of staring at that scar.

Tim sighs. “Are you?”

“No,” Jason says.

Tim’s grip sinks deeper into the couch. “Fuck you for coming,” he says, and Jason shrugs, because he agrees. “I have to give a speech in twenty minutes. I’m supposed to do that now that you’re here?” He releases the couch cushion and clasps both his hands together in his lap, his fingers going white-knuckled on each other. “I’m terrified,” he says.

“Of the speech?”

“Of you,” Tim says. “It’s been nine months. I don’t know if you knew that.”

Jason wants to laugh and cry. They don’t talk about it. That’s the rule.

And yet.

“It’s been ten days,” Jason says. “I don’t know if you knew that.” He looks up into Tim’s face, into his clear blue eyes, and he’s lost, he’s done, he’ll do anything, say anything, _be_ anything if it means nine months runs to ten, to twelve, to a hundred. He opens his mouth to see what comes out, but he doesn’t have to talk at all, because Tim’s smiling, and then laughing, and when they kiss it’s like coming home. _Home_ , whispers the evil braincell, and Jason sighs. Yeah. Home.

**Author's Note:**

> you: hey sister, do you take constructive criticism on the length of your sentences?
> 
> me: I DO NOT


End file.
